Search This Blog

Here's how hip hop critique works these days. New 'product' gets rolled out on Datpiff or HotNewHipHop. If it's any good, or if it's by an artist who isn't regularly picking up tens of millions of youtube views or regularly instagrams/tweets images of his/her wealth, then it will be ignored by most, pick up some cursory ratings of about 7/10 by site-visitors and then disappear into obscurity. There will be five comments under it, usually bemoaning the fact it's being ignored. Meanwhile some twat called Kevin or called Lil or called Yung or called Nipsey or named after a brand will be picking up millions of listens/hits thanks to some shady sponsorship dealio or the fact that last week he happened to fart near a mic and Drake happened to smell it. The comments underneath this dross will vacillate between about 90% 'STR8 FUEGO' and 10% 'WTF IS THIS TRASH'.

<a href="http://hieroglyphicsimperium.bandcamp.com/album/3-dimensional-prescriptions-3">3 Dimensional Prescriptions by Tristate and Oh No</a>
Personally it's difficult to give a fuck. Hip hop doesn't belong to those sites anymore than it belongs to anyone, even if they're great for a lazy lope around the state-of-the-art. Hip hop if you slip the mental leash currently insisting that only commerce equates to 'success' and that only such a narrow definition of 'success' matters to anyone, belongs equally to producers like psyche-meister Oh No, and rappers like the singular Tristate from Durag Dynasty. You might remember DD's album with Alchemist from 2013 (the superb 360 Waves - if you don't know, get to know) - all you need to know is that 3 Dimensional Prescriptions features perhaps DD's most absorbing lyricist hooking up with Cali beat-meister Oh No and the results are so good you don't even notice Alchemists' absence from proceedings (oh I know he can't produce EVERYTHING but dammit I wish he could sometimes). It's a stunningly realised triumph and one of thee hip hop albums of 2017 thus far.

[BTW - another feature of hip hop critique at the moment - talk of 'features' i.e cameos as if buying an album is all about seeing what Van Den Plas-like extras you get - here you get rhymes not just from Tristate but also from Hus Kingpin, Westside Gunn, Gangrene, Evidence and former DD brother Planet Asia and EVERYONE is on fire and crucially the cohesion remains, each cameo actually serving a purpose rather than serving ego(s), something so often lost with the dizzying array of collaborators all hip hop albums seemingly have to carry these days.]

'Showroom Floor' serves as a neat introduction to the soundworld here - both gritty AND lush, gnarly and glittering, this is perhaps the finest suite of beats and loops Oh No has ever laced together. Though the lyrics talk about it being 'strictly for the vintage connoisseurs/straight off the showroom floor' I'd argue that as RTJ have proved this kind of beautifully appointed carnage is actually more like the sound of right fkn now than trap's already-dated dwindlings. Some hilarious snatched dialogue from an overheard coffee-shop conversation ("You know what it is? - you're upset cos you have a bullshit-assed job and you're LATE to your bullshit-assed job ./. . you can't buy a car cos you've got a bullshit-assed job") eases us into the hair-trigger tension of 'Custom' - killer-cams from Hus Kingpin, Westside Gunn and Lyric Jones piling into the dubbed-out oddity and needling guitar-riffage to seal the deal

'Networth' and 'G.T.D' mellow the vibe but keep the minutiae exquisite, Xiomara's cooing vox on the latter absolutely ravishing, the track caressing you like a summer breeze and leaving so soon you're left craving more. '6 Sun Raise Son' is another posse cut wherein Casual, Brotha J & Bro AA Rasheed ride a stern peal of drone-funk akin to RZA's darkest work on 'Forever'. Oh No's attention to detail is crucial on tracks like this - where so many producers would just let the vocal lead, he intertwines just the right changes here and there, a little reverb on that snare, a little echo on those keys to make tracks have a flow that amplifies and accentuates the changing cadences of the rappers involved. 'Wind Chime Wizardry' is damn near hollowed out, just a rather bewitching chime-melody under which beats both old-and-nu-skool boom, rumble and twinkle, Planet Asia's verbals paramount before some truly unhinged Strange-U-style (regular readers will know praise comes no higher) funk buzzes you through to the coda. 'Imhotep' sashays and swings like the finest swishiest moments from Curren$y's 'Carrollton Heist', 'Movie Script' has perhaps the best cameo of the whole set (a stunning slice of femme-aggravation from Rogue Venom - check out her own startling 'Death To The Fake Shit EP' here ) and 'Tears On My Nautica' sees long-time Tristate collaborator Washeyi Choir drop a scintillating verse into a swirl of rhodes-laden abstraction (he also pops up later on the fantastic 'Latest Drug'). 'Spaceship' puts afro-futurist paranoiac fantasy atop an unplaceably addictive slice of krautrock boombap before 'Write Wrongs' ('fuck rap I need progression/might even sing like One Direction') plunges Gangrene into the kind of lush widescreen soundscape Quincy Jones used to make - the edges and textures spinning out into the infinite, one of ON's most stunning productions yet.

As an album '3 Dimensional Prescriptions' doesn't suffer from its conceptual fuzziness (there's a loose theme here about 3-d printing, drugs and the general approach of armageddon), rather it's a messy album in the best sense, never limiting itself or stopping itself spraying out in whatever musical or lyrical direction it's pulled in by its protaganists. And where cameos can so often render albums anonymous, here they sharpen and define its characterisation, leave you with the impression that Tri's compadres are a dazzlingly diverse array of all that's best about underground hip hop from the US right now. An essential album not just because of that snapshot it gives but because sonically, it's perhaps the most moreish huff of smokey delight you've inhaled since Havoc's 'Silent Partner'. Get down on it. I went on hotnewhiphop.com today to see if the stream for this had picked up any more likes. It hasn't. Good.
Too good for Twitter.

(Neil Kulkarni)

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

(photo by Pat Pope, full text) MANIC STREET PREACHERS ASTORIA, LONDON
SORRY, lifelong fan, but I’m a new convert. I got into them
a week ago and here I am.
(They start with “Faster and, after the dub and horrorcore
they’ve played, it jarrs and fits perfectly.)
OK, see it ain’t attitude cos anyone can do that, just cock
a snook and suck your cheeks. It ain’t glamour. Glamour is boring. Glamour is
loud pretty people who hug, hug, hug, giggling at your geek self all night. And
it ain’t rock’n’roll; it was your rock’n’roll that made a nigger-hater the
King, your teddy boys who Paki-bashed for Mosley, Notting Hill 1958, your rock’#n’roll
build on SAMBO DON’T SELL. I ain’t interested and the Manics are way beyond
that.
(“Yes” is Stjepan Mestrovic’s “Balkanisation Of The West”
turned punk anthem, as if it could be any more punk. No higher compliment
exists.)
The four founding
points of Manics songs – one: modern life is untenable. Two: no one ever gets
used to loneliness. Three: if tr…

OK, a week since the vote and hey, I know the drill. Similar to those habits you kicked back into after 9-11, after 7-7. Heads down. Don't notice the people crossing the road to avoid you. Don't register any reaction to the shop assistants who drop the change with a panic'd repulsion into your foul brown palm. Keep your eyes down, no eye-contact with anyone. Get through the street to safety because the street is a place where you are a target again now, just as you were as a child. Don't ever ever relax again because that moment where your vigilance slips, when you start doubting your own paranoia, is the moment when the van draws up and three pink faces look your way grinning, when the kids see their chance to have some fun, when the guy on his bike who you hadn't thought of leans into the pavement to spit his venom, when the words will come unbidden and deafening, those words that won't just fuck up your day but will haunt your sleep, …

This was my dream. And it was so vivid it really happened.
I hired a van. The expense was a concern but I needed the capacity. First the long drive north to Middlesborough. I knew he'd be at home, visiting relatives. Made sure my HeadBag was packed. Blindfolds and ballgags. Rope. Some starved, stroppy badgers. Maxi-pack of chloroform-seeped bogroll from Costco. Masking tape. As I eased onto the M1 I told myself again the story of how it was developed from the need for waterproof ammunition casings in WWII. I had to, I was bored, and it's a long schlep up to 'boro. Idly, after securing a mortgage for a bacon roll at Tibshelf, I had an argument with my other personality about whether Middlesborough was in North Yorkshire, County Durham or Teeside.
Nothing got resolved. A plain-clothes officer pulled me off in the hardshoulder near Malton and issued stern words about punching myself while driving. No hilarity did ensue. I needed to focus. This was a serious business. By noo…